Energy Crisis

Whilst I completely agree with your sentiments in the first paragraphs Andy, the solution is not to limit available energy to the public, or make it unaffordable. Such a solution would result in a huge reduction in freedom and satisfaction with life, and public transport everywhere except the largest cities is basically impossible and as energy-intensive as cars. Unfortunately, the "Green dream" is an unacceptable proposition, at least in the foreseeable future, because NOTHING has been done for the last 50 years to enable the changes that are now wanted. One can immediately see that from an Engineering standpoint replacement of the property stock virtually completely makes no sense, building and building materials are very energy-intensive and equally labour intensive. We cannot build 300,000 new homes each year, and those that are built are often defective or of poor quality. The present stock has been built over the last 100 years or more, it is going to take that long to rebuild most of it, and the financing of such a programme is impossible.


Now to energy sources. Here the Engineers have been ignored or shouted down or both for most of my lifetime. We used to be the World leader in Nuclear, but politics has taken an attitude that such is evil, and will lead to more nuclear wars and pollution. Neither has happened, and having Nuclear power is not the precursor of it. There are more than enough bombs available to us and others now to make the idea of using them largely futile. Various people (few in politics) are suggesting that we move more to nuclear which seems to me to be the best response to the problems we face. However, any nuclear plant (even small modular ones) takes years to build, and is very expensive, both money and energy. Even if we gained unlimited Electricity from nuclear, distributing it will be vastly expensive in all ways too. Each house at present has the supply system engineered to provide 1-2 kW, although because all loads do not operate at once, one can use a lot more for short periods. Gas currently provides about twice the energy that electricity does, largely for space heating in homes (forget gas powered electricity for the moment), that is around 100 GW in winter. Even if this is replaced by 30GW of COP=3 heat pumps, it is still 30GW we don't have and cannot distribute without vast upgrades to the electricity infrastructure. It is worth outlining these: build 10 new 3 GW Nuclear plants, dig up every suburban road completely to fit larger cables to every house, replace all substations with one of 3 times the physical and electrical size (probably impossible), replace all the high voltage cables, replace all the pylons with 3 in place, replace all the overhead lines, needing bigger poles etc. Even the materials for such a programme would affect world commodity prices upwards considerably, and if several countries try this at once the world's mines and refineries will need to be replaced with several times as many! It is simply not affordable under any circumstances.

This is an Engineer's view of the "Green dream" and dreams it will remain until there is a solution to the above insoluble problems.


If sense does not prevail, the result will be to kill a large proportion of the population in cold countries, you have prepared somewhat but the poor, old, and less adequate groups will suffer greatly. Even the science of climate change is largely unknown and often very wrong, particularly in its predictions, strangely like the Covid crisis. I would never forget that politicians are usually self-interested fools, we shall see!